College Aces Putnam Again

For the eighth time in the past 14 years, Harvard has won the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.

The six-hour, 12-question exam was administered by the Mathematical Association of America in December and was taken by a total of 3,753 students from 516 colleges in the United States and Canada.

Results were released by the College’s mathematics department on Friday.

The winning team members were Tiankai Liu ’08, Alison B. Miller ’08 and Zachary R. Abel ’10, each of whom received a $1,000 award.

“It’s surreal,” Abel said about the win. “It was nothing that I was expecting.”

Arnav Tripathy ’11, who was named a Putnam fellow—an honor given to the six highest scorers on the exam—said he was excited to be among the top six scorers.

“It’s pretty cool,” he said. “I figured I had a pretty good chance. Obviously I hadn’t competed in Putnam before, but it wasn’t a complete shock.”

While teams of three students are chosen to represent their schools each year, other students can also participate individually.

Liu, Miller, and Justin J. Bae ’08 were among the next ten highest ranking individuals, each winning a prize of $1,000.

Abel, Iurie Boreico ’11, and Shrenik N. Shah ’08 placed among the next eight highest ranking individuals in the competition.

Zhou Fan ’10 and Rishi Gupta ’09 received honorable mentions.

Miller also won the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, an award given to the top scoring female competitor, for the third time.

“I have friends on the other school’s teams, so I’d be happy regardless of the outcome,” she said. “But I’m so happy about Harvard’s win.”

Despite the exam’s difficulty, the winners said they did not cram for the exam.

“The team members didn’t prepare all together,” Abel said. “I prepared a little bit by looking through some previous exams, but nothing too extreme.”

Tripathy said that winning competitions is not as important as proving theorems.

“No one here really takes it that seriously,” he said of the competition.

When asked if they had plans for their prize money, the day’s winners said they were still deciding.

“No plans,” Miller said. “I used to just save my money, but I should probably do something creative with it.”

Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and Duke rounded out the top five schools this year.